Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Literary Blog Hop -- November 11-14

This week the question is the following: What is the most difficult literary work you've ever read? What made it so difficult?

That's an easy one. A few years back I read two books, both called Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic. The trick was that one edition of the books was labeled "male" and one was labeled "female," and between the two books everything was the same except for one paragraph. The difficulty came in trying to find the paragraph in question, and that meant reading line for line through both books. The book itself is excellent, but it took so much time to find this one paragraph. In case anyone wants to read it, I won't give away the show, but it was definitely a chore to finish! I suppose I could have cheated, but I just couldn't do it.

wow! Such strange and wonderful books I'm coming across in this blog hop. I'm going to try it your way.

This book reminds me of 'Only Revolutions' by Mark Danielewski. It's a similar concept. The book is about two lovers Hailey and Sam. Their story is told simultaneously in same book but you have to flip the book upside-down to read the other version. It's wonderful when you get to the middle, because it's like their stories finally converge and then move off in the opposite direction.

Oh, the humanity, and the originality of just one paragraph making all the difference between the reading experience of the two genders. What a hoot. It's awfully hard to not want to cut to the chase, indeed!

Dan: yes. The other most bizarre book I read was House of Leaves, although I actually got through that one easily. I was so tempted to cheat on Dictionary of the Khazars ... so tempted I had to physically restrain myself from turning on the computer. Would I do that again? Probably.

This has to be the most interesting book I've seen on this hop so far. I'd never heard of it before. I bet it took forever to find the difference! But I bet by the time you did you really knew the book well. I'm glad you brought it up. I'm definitely going to have to go check it out, even if I only read about it online somewhere.

About Me

bottom line: I love to read.
I use this space to record and to talk about what I've read during the year. You won't see descriptions like "lush, lyrical prose" here ... I'm just an ordinary reader person who wants to share a love of the written word. I don't really "review" -- that's for the pros. I just offer opinions. Feel free to comment any time.